Hericourt, Jenny P. D' (1809-1875)

Hericourt, Jenny P. D' (1809-1875), writer and women's rights activist, was born as Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard,
in Besançon. Her family background and early upbringing was Protestant, Montbéliard Lutheran on her
father's side and Swiss Calvinist on her mother's side.

Before the recent retrieval of Jenny P. d'Hericourt's brief autobiography, she was one of the least well
known of the women active in the 1848 revolution. We now know that prior to that time she had run a private girls'
school in Paris, had married and then separated from a husband named Gabriel Marie (divorce being impossible under
French law at that time), and had become an enthusiastic adherent of the ideas of Etienne Cabet.
She had also published a novel, Le Fils du reprouve (1844), under the pen name of Félix Lamb.

By her own account, Jenny P. d'Hericourt had a lifelong sympathy for victims and oppressed creatures.
In early 1848 Jenny d'Hericourt organized thirty women into a society to work for women's civil liberties;
the manifesto of this Société pour l'émancipation des femmes (dated 16 March),
signed by V. Longueville as president, and J. P. d'Hericourt, as secretary, has been recovered in the National Archives.
Hericourt also organized evening schools for workers of both sexes and worked to influence the elections.
In particular she took credit for forcing consideration of the issue of women's equality in Cabet's
Société fraternelle centrale, and for having successfully smuggled Auguste Blanqui
through Paris, following his indictment by the high court in May. These latter activities remain as yet unconfirmed
by archival evidence. Whether she is the same person as the "Jeanne-Marie" who played an active role in the
Voix des femmes group remains open to question.

Hericourt's enthusiasm for the Icarians was greatly stimulated by Cabet's endorsement of women as medical doctors.
Although the faculties were then closed to women, Hericourt managed to study homeopathic medicine in Paris, and
following the election of Louis Napoleon as president, completed her studies with a stage in a hospital for practical
obstetrics. She acknowledged receiving a diploma as a maitresse sage femme, which Anteghini has since
located under the Poinsard name in the 1859 records of the Paris Faculty of Medicine. All these experiences,
followed by a major polemic with Proudhon in the mid 1850s and her analysis of the various schools of thought
on social and political change with respect to the position of women, culminated in the publication in 1860 of
Hericourt's landmark study, La Femme affranchie: réponse MM. Michelet, Proudhon, E. de Girardin,
A. Comte et aux autres novateurs modernes (Brussels: Van Meenen et Cie, and Paris: A. Bohn).

Karen Offen

Bibliography

Moses, Claire Goldberg. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.